No description available.

My proposed PhD, titled Zola's Naturalism in The Rougon-Macquart: The Fatality of Sexuality, aims to study the basics of the naturalistic novel in the second half of the nineteenth-century France. Firstly, I have looked back at previous critical studies that were dedicated to the themes of sexuality and/or fatality in Zola's writing. This introductory chapter helped me understand how far critics have gone and what a long way we still have to go before we can fully appreciate the importance of these themes in the context of naturalism. Throughout the twenty novels that make The Rougon-Macquart series, I studied the fictional characters in their being, their appearance and their evolution in space and time. I therefore investigated whether or not these characters were masters or slaves of their space and time and beyond that, what influences they had on each other. Afterwards, I questioned the fecundity of the theme of sexuality in Zola's work to find out both the aspects of originality in his writing and his contribution to the modern novel. Nevertheless, I have criticized Zola on a wider angle as an emeritus writer with his own "weaknesses". Methodologically, I have largely used the semiotics approach along with psychoanalysis due to the specificity of sexuality. Despite the wide range of critical studies on Zola's novels, in my sense, most of them have so far failed to tackle naturalism at its foundations, i.e. sexuality. In fact, if one attempted to free The Rougon-Macquart from the theme of sexuality, neither the Rougon-Macquart family would exist nor the twenty novels they generated. Studying sexuality therefore appeared to be essential to the understanding of the naturalistic theory. However, and surprisingly so, most of Zola's critics have avoided that inescapable theme, perhaps more likely for reasons of decency rather than for scientific ones. It is in such context that I have decided that it was time to bring it to light for the sake of truth about the knowledge of Zola.

What is it for something to be good? Using the example of an Ebola-like microbe, I argue that a merely kind-based account of goodness is defective (Chapter 1). I offer instead an account that is both kind-based and platonic (Chapter 2). On such an account, goodness turns out to be non-natural (Chapter 3). However, non-naturalists can explain why the goodness of an individual supervenes on its natural properties, by appealing to the essence of the kind to which it belongs (Chapter 4).

According to many philosophers and scientists, human sociality is explained by our unique capacity to ‘share’ the mental states of others and to form collective intentional states. Collective intentionality has been widely debated in the past two decades, focusing especially on the issue of its reducibility to individual intentionality and the place of collective intentions in the natural realm. It is not clear, however, to what extent these two issues are related, and what methodologies of investigation are appropriate in each case. In this thesis I set out a theory of the naturalization of collective intentionality that draws a line between naturalizability arguments and theories of collective intentionality naturalized. The former provide reasons for believing in the naturalness of collective intentional states based on our commonsense understanding of them; the latter offer responses to the ontological question about the existence and identity of collective as distinct from individual intentionality. This model is naturalistic because it holds that the only way to establish the place of mental entities in the order of things is through the theory and practice of science. After reviewing naturalizability arguments in philosophy, I consider an influential research program in the cognitive sciences. On the account that I present, the irreducibility of collective intentionality can be derived from a theory of human development in scientific psychology dealing with phenomena of sociality like communication, recently refined by Michael Tomasello.

It is my purpose in this thesis to show any influence that Emile Zola's Naturalism had on the novels of Blasco Ibáñez.. Because the novels of the Spanish author contain many suggestions of the Zolaesque theory of Naturalism, many literary critics have assumed that he did obtain much of his inspiration from this source; they have even called him the "Spanish Zola." I shall try to determine how much he imitated Zola's Naturalism, and to show to what extent it is correct to call him the "Spanish Zola."

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal.

Subject to this degree work is the character of prostitutes in French society in the 19th century reflected in eight selected works of French authors of the time. In the first part of my thesis the history of prostitution from "religious prostitution" in ancient Greece to its "golden age" in France in the 19th century is described. The decay of moral principles in the post-Revolutionary period (as a result of religious and social taboos collapse) causes a great spread of prostitution and venereal diseases. Because of these reasons it was necessary to take the legalizing and organizing precautions - the French System. The second part of this work takes addresses the different (romantic and naturalistic) representations of the character of the prostitute in the literature of the 19th century. The representative of the romantic interpretation of the courtesan who is driven to sin due to poverty (the myth of the "fallen angel" redeemed by pure love) is Honoré de Balzac and his novel "The Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans". The opposite pole to the romantic interpretation of prostitutes is a naturalistic beast which chooses the oldest profession herself as a means of executing social revenge. In this second, analytical, part of this work the comparison of both of these kinds is made. Key words:...

The focus of this thesis lies on the outstanding Spanish realistic and naturalistic novel of the 19th century known as La Regenta by Leopoldo Alas "Clarin". The thesis is divided into two parts, the first is oriented towards historical and cultural context of the novel's origin, biography of the author and general introduction of the novel. The second part of the thesis concentrates on a main character Ana Ozores de Quintanar, mainly from psychological and sociological perspective. Sole chapter is then dedicated to comparison of novels La Regenta and Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert and its main heroines. The primary aim of the thesis is to study the main character Ana Ozores, her gradual formation and to analyze her relationship with other key characters of the novel and factors which brought heroine's demise in the end.

The epistemological problem of unity and its development in the philosophy of Bertrand Russell is the main subject of this essay. The first chapter is devoted to naïve realism developed by G. E. Moore and adopted by early Russell. I explain the notion of objective unity of proposition. The second chapter concerns Russell's departure from naïve realism and the multiple relation of judgment which Wittgenstein's criticism rendered as fatally unable to handle the problem of synthetic unity. The breakdown of this theory led Russell to naturalism, which is the topic of the last chapter. I pay special attention to the regressive argument proposed in slightly different versions by Moore, L. Wittgenstein and G. Ryle. Keywords realism, neutral monism, behaviorism, unity, consciousness

The discussion of worldviews is today dominated by two worldviews, Theism and Naturalism, each with its own advantages and problems. Theism has the advantage of accommodating the individual with existential answers whilst having problems with integrating more recent scientific understandings of the universe. Naturalism on the other hand does well by our developments of science, the problem being instead that this understanding meets difficulty in answering some of the essentials of our existence: questions of mentality and morality. These two views differ fundamentally in stances of ontology and epistemology, and seem not in any foreseeable future to be reconcilable. To deal with this issue, Panpsychism is presented here as the worldview that can accommodate for both existential issues and scientific understanding.